Personally, it’s less of motivation and more of direction and tracking. I’ve never worked a job and have a hard time maintaining routines, so a list of all I can/should do helps my brain stay in lane.
I don’t need to be close to 100%; I want to balance the important things and try not to fall below 50% in any.
If you look at the right sidebar on the goals sheet, I have a dozen filters based on time of the day, category of activity, done status of the activity, importance, etc. That helps me feel less overwhelmed.
Other little things like the Progress bar of time vs. my score on the top, month performance bar chart, ranks, and weekly/monthly performance help me stay motivated.
I have a turbo mode, which changes the balance of the weight. The starred activities are given a lot more weightage, and I get points and ranks based on that. There is a lot of back-end and “code” to what is seen here as well.
Yes! Design is very important to me, I’ve spend many hours on this. But if I like looking at it, I stick to opening it everyday and keeping it open. I have a TV in front which has these dashboards open all day.
If you want to copy the design or style of any element here, I can send the sheets.
Thanks for all that additional info - it’s really helpful and I love the “hacks” you’ve put in place to make this additive to your workflow and not just a burden.
And the design really is great. Thank you for the kind offer - I don’t want the sheets now or I’ll go down the rabbit hole of spending time trying to make mine look 50% as nice as yours. I don’t have time for that this week ;-). At some point in the future when I want a fun side project for a half-day I’ll reach back out.
I would also be interested in a copy of those sheets, if you’re willing. I’ve never really played with Numbers (day job is very Excel-based) but I’d love to experiment with it a bit more. That really is a beautiful dashboard!
Almost all the habit-tracking apps score you based on the number of logs. If you log drinking a glass of water, it counts the same as a log of gym visit or an hour of deep work.
This is why I gave weightage to each activity based on the duration, challenge, importance, and impact on me. My daily score provides a good balance of how impactful today was, same with the week and month.
This approach works well, but at some point, the brain catches up and tries to rack in points based on a single activity rather than a combination of activities. E.g., rather than working out, completing projects, practicing a skill, I can read a non-fiction book for 10 hours and get way more points without much resistance.
So I created EQ mode where it takes care of the weightage, but the number of logs also counts. So even if you did 10% of the activity that day, it would count as a log, and more activities will count towards the final points. Doing 5x the amount of one activity won’t add much.
Currently I do 25% log weightage and 75% actual points weightage to calculate final points with EQ mode. It sounds complex, but it isn’t and gives you a very balanced result.
I wouldn’t have guessed that this was done in Apple Numbers. This is a fantastic example of what can be done with Numbers. You mentioned, “There is a lot of back-end and code…”. I can certainly believe that. Just curious, but do you make the back-end as nice looking as the views shown above?
Are the horizontal percent bars made from single-series graphs?
Again, great job. Thanks for posting. It serves as a stimulus for me to work on improving my Numbers spreadsheets.
They’re all 2D Stacked Bars with 2 series. Series 1 refers the percentage that you want to display in the progress bar, series 2 references a static 100% cell.
Just wanted to chime in that, in terms of goal tracking, Amazing Marvin has the Habit Tracking and the Goals and Objectives strategies that can be combined. It’s not exactly a “personal dashboard” but comes not that far away and of course Amazing Marvin would integrate a gazillion other things (tasks and calendar schedule, for example).
This dashboard/tracker is really impressive and inspiring, @tav! Thank you for sharing your work. In the coming weeks, I’m hoping to build my own goal and habit tracker based on your design.
FWIW, I needed to install SF Symbols to get the iconography to work on my Mac, which is running macOS Monterey 12.1.
Thank you Jacob.
Ahh yes I forgot. I have plans to convert this into a native mac app based on SwiftUI so I decided to use SF Symbols from the get-go. But as a numbers sheet we need either that or SF Pro font installed on the system.
I track 5 things that really matter to me. It takes about 30 seconds a day. If I didn’t track them at all, I wouldn’t have any of the (good) pressure I feel when I fall behind and fail to do the things I claim are important to me.
That’s no knock on people who are wired differently. Tav has “gamified” his to the point where I could see how that can be quite enjoyable and motivating. But for me, I need 5 big things I can track in 30 seconds or less.
